Historical considerations
Questions for which I do not have hard and fast answers. Opinions, always. Answers, no.
September 2007, in the quiet after-hours of the festivities honoring the anniversary of Alexander Schmorell’s 90th birthday in Orenburg, Russia, sitting in darkened hotel foyer, a critical conversation began. A few attendees protested the telling of the full White Rose story, warts and all, arguing that histories about resistance should focus solely on their actions, not so much who they were.
This conversation has never ended. It was picked up again in July 2013 at a session of the White Rose Conference, as we mulled over difficulties our friends at Shoah Foundation encounter with testimonies.
The big-picture question: How do we balance the need for historical accuracy with families’ desire for privacy?
No one disputes that history should be dealt with objectively. It’s a matter of unearthing facts, facts that can appear unconnected or unrelated, and compiling them into a meaningful format. That ‘definition’ oversimplifies the historical process, but it’s a starting point for this discussion. Objective historical research leaves little room for emotion or personal feelings.
Yet this particular area of research - German resistance in general, White Rose resistance in particular - involves real-life people who deeply love the persons being studied. “History” is intimate to them, recorded in family photo albums and precious artifacts. Many of these surviving family members lost everything, and sometimes everyone, during a dark and violent stretch of that otherwise-objective history. No matter how much we want it to be, recent history cannot always remain detached and remote, because feelings of living family members matter.
I know what I believe on this topic, namely that balance is key. Things like Hans Scholl’s pedophilia and drug addiction do matter, because the Gestapo used them against him e.g. to persuade him to divulge Christoph Probst’s name. It is not irrelevant to the telling of White Rose history.
These are the questions that were raised in Orenburg, and that remain to this day. What do you think?
Can history be written objectively as long as “eyewitnesses” are still alive?
How can we differentiate between eyewitnesses who have a real story to tell and those who abuse oral history for their own agendas? White Rose has been especially vulnerable to this abuse of oral history.
How or when do we successfully remove false oral histories? Shoah Foundation’s policy is to leave it, unasterisked, relying on historians to refute false testimonies. We have tackled Jürgen Wittenstein’s blatant falsehoods in our publication, Evolution of Memory. But that is the tip of the iceberg.
What criteria should apply when deciding to include negative material in a history? Is it always fair game, or should it sometimes be excluded? Does it matter if the history is recent?
A debate that is relevant for us in 2022: We wish to publish Lieselotte Fürst-Ramdohr’s remarkable memoirs in English translation. Herta Probst and Erich Schmorell vouched for her memories as accurate, fairly representing the friendships that underpinned White Rose resistance. But she mixed up dates, since her memoirs were based on notes made a few years after the war, not from diaries or letters. She gave us permission to correct dates in the English translation. Good idea? Bad idea? Why?
In closing, this is another of the posts that will be for paying subscribers only after January. However, this particular topic seems far too critical to put behind a paywall. We encourage your input!